For more information about what I'm interested in, see the Ponding pages.

The Hummingbirds are back11 Jun 2004

The hummingbirds came back. We have (at least) one pair -- they were displaying the other night.

This picture is not that good, but the light was fading when I took it. I think that in more light, I'd get a shorter exposure and more depth of field.

The pondcam will be moving soon6 Jun 2004

We are selling our house -- the open house is today. We will be moving to another house which has a much larger pond. The pondcam will be back once we complete the move.

The new pond will be so much larger that I am worried that the pondcam will never see any fish at all. It may take a couple of seasons for them to breed up enough! We will be taking our existing goldfish and shubunkins (those that we can catch), and the new owners will probably end up with all the 2004 babies!

Pond is working again!18 Apr 2004

We finally got eh pump going again today -- the waterfall now falls. We cleared out the muck at the bottom, and pulled out a number of dead frogs and fish. The problem was that (I think) the top pond almost froze to the bottom. Only three fish (of about 20) survived.

The pipework also suffered from the cold -- one of the sections (made of Schedule 40 PVC) had fractured and needed to be replaced. It was (of course) in a very awkward spot.

We planted up a bunch of Canna Lilies that had overwintered inside. I also have 100 (or so) Yellow Flag Iris that overwintered in the pond. The idea (in the fall) was to try and sell them on Ebay, but in the spring, it seems much less like a good idea!

The ice is really melting now and things are floating to the surface6 Mar 2004

We have now had almost a week of reasonable weather, and the pond ice is melting quickly. However, this also means that 'things' are floating up to the surface.

This afternoon (Saturday), I found one of our two Golden Orfes floating on the surface. We have had them for about five years, and this one was around 10 inches long.

We will miss him (or her!).

Fish Disaster28 Feb 2004

I had placed a sheet of insulating foam over the pond to try and protect it from the cold weather that we have been having. The bubbler was bubbling away quite nicely underneath it. Then we went away on vacation for a week, and then today I decided to look underneath the foam.

What I saw shocked me -- there were 14 fish in about half an inch of water that that accumulated under the foam and above the ice on the pond. Most of the fish were lying on their sides, half out of the water. At this point, panic set in.

It appeared that the bubbler had stopped, and that there was no way to get the fish back into the pond. One of the fish was dead, but the others looked salvageable. I grabbed a bucket and filled it with snow and then added tap water -- so I ended up with a few gallons of water at 32°F. We rescued 12 fish fairly easily, the thirteenth (a large Shubunkin) was partially frozen into the ice. After a bit of work with some cold tap water, we got him (her?) out of the ice and into the bucket.

A bit of work with boiling water opened up the hole back into the pond (we still have at least 10 inches of ice), and we transferred the fish back into the pond. We are hoping that they all survive.

Is this the year of Voice Over IP (VOIP)14 Jan 2004

I've started to play with Asterisk PBX. This is an open source IP PBX. The hassle is getting a device that can talk to a phone. I suspect that the best route to go is with a device like the Cisco ATA (as used by Vonage and others). The Sipura 2000 seems to be rather cheaper and is used by some newer IP vendors. However, it is not clear that my IP service over my cable modem is really reliable enough. I probably need to start to monitor uptime.

My plan is to try and route all outgoing calls out over IP and use the landline for incoming and emergency outgoing. I feel that Free World Dialup features somewhere in the solution.

On a related note, I found UK-2-ME, which gave me a UK phone number that rings my phone in the US. For free. A UK person who calls this number pays the national rate -- i.e. regular long distance rates. A great deal -- especially at weekends.

Logs to Burn30 Dec 2003

My grandmother -- Honor Goodhart -- wrote a poem in 1926 entitled "Logs to Burn" that describes the burning characteristics of many different types of wood. The context was a coal strike that (presumably) restricted the supply of coal, and hence boosted the use of wood for heating.

Most references to this poem do not have the correct attribution, and this note (may) start to set the record straight.

SPAM -- a modern scourge22 Dec 2003

I have been playing around with SPF which adds a layer of verification on top of regular SMTP mail. The idea is prety simple -- mail coming from my domain should only be sent from a limited number of mail servers. A spammer or email worm who tries to forge the from address as me will get blocked.

To set this up, you just have to publish an SPF record for your domain in DNS. This record is a TXT record of a specific format, as described at the site above.

If you are also an MTA operator, then you can turn on SPF support in your MTA -- again, instructions at the site mentioned above.

Is this the solution to SPAM? Definitely not, but it is a piece of the puzzle.

You can send email to spftest@gladstonefamily.net
and the daemon will return a recommendation for your SPF record. It will also tell you if your existing SPF record looks good.

Meatspace & GEOURL25 Nov 2003

Somebody pointed me at geourl.org which is building a map of the physical locations that websites deal with. If you choose then you get to see who my virtual (physical?) neighours are.

At lot of them appear to be hosted on DeviantART -- which appears to be some sort of art site where you can submit your work and people comment on it. There is other weird stuff in this list as well. I found the Weather Pixie which gives you a small image that shows what the weather is like nearby. The bad news is that I can't see how to inject my own data......

Beta Testing the Prismiq21 Oct 2003(Updated 22 Oct 2003)

I've been beta testing the new software (3.2) for the Prismiq Media Player. The good news is that Prismiq seem open (check out their forums) and the box runs linux. It is supposed to be a music, slideshow, video player where the media is stored on some other computer.

The bad news is that it doesn't meet the requirements. The Rio Receiver with JReceiver is a much better solution for audio. There are all sorts of possibilities with the hardware platform, it is just a matter of software to improve things.

For example, searching a large music collection requires entering text strings with the numeric keys on the remote. Tracks are not sorted by anything obvious. The use cases seem to revolve around using your PC to create playlists and then play them on the Prismiq box. However, I want an appliance that can be used by naive users.

Another gripe was that the slide advance button has no audible or visual feedback. Given that the next slide takes several seconds to appear (why isn't it preloaded?) there is the temptation to press the button again -- which causes a double advance.

Update for final release: It seems that there is now a visual indication of the next picture coming. This is a significant improvement.